About two months ago, a woman in her forties contacted me about the fact that she couldn’t claim her Mortgage Reducing Term Assurance (MRTA) upon her husband’s death, because he died of an AIDS-related illness.
This was despite the fact that HIV was contracted after the purchase of the policy.
“What if I can’t pay for the house?” she asked me. “Does the bank just take back (sic) the house? So what happens to my kids? Are we going to live on the roadside?”
Suddenly, this housewife is thrust into a lifetime of uncertainty because Malaysia-based insurance companies discriminate, based on archaic beliefs that HIV is like, the worst disease, ever; and the fact that they’ll have to pay out monstrous payments.
Contrary to all recent medical evidence, these companies continue to discriminate against people living with HIV.
They discriminate not only on MRTA, but on all forms of insurance including medical insurance and life insurance.
They continue to discriminate despite their parent companies in the US, the UK and even Hong Kong, providing coverage for people living with HIV.
The most recent example of this is in 2015. Prudential Financial in the US, on World AIDS Day, announced that they would provide life insurance for people living with HIV.
We know, of course, that anti-retroviral medications for HIV, provided free by the Malaysian government, are so fantastic that they suppress the virus so much that people CAN’T TRANSMIT IT (partner study).
Doctors in the field often say that managing treatment of a person living with HIV is easier than the management of a person living with diabetes. How do you prevent someone from drinking that extra teh tarik? It’s tough. But with HIV, all it takes is a pill a day, and people’s HIV levels in the blood become undetectable.
So why do they need insurance then, if these awesome medicines are provided free? Well, they might break an arm while playing on the jungle gym, and need it to be in a cast.
They might have an uncontrollable sweet tooth and get diabetes. This whole idea that providing coverage for HIV will result in a whole slew of correlated diseases is nonsense from the olden times. We need to move on with the times – and by that, base policies on the MOST recent medical evidence.
Insurance discrimination on the grounds of HIV has been featured in major newspapers worldwide. In the Wall Street Journal on the February 24, 2015, the US federal government flagged these insurers for “potentially discriminatory practices” for providing drastically higher premiums for people living with HIV. Much less not providing insurance at all, as we do here.
We pretend, sometimes, that we’re a developed nation, and that social justice is the ultimate goal. But law and policy, like Windeyer J said: “[is] marching with medicine, but in the rear and limping a little.”
And unfortunately, this limping is resulting in catastrophic violations of the human right to health. World AIDS Day is coming up in December, and it would be totally, totally awesome, if just one insurance company would take that first heroic step to protect the rights of people living with HIV.
- See more at: http://www.themalaymailonline.com/what-you-think/article/insurance-discrimination-on-the-basis-of-hiv-fifa-rahman#sthash.BiVKBnZC.dpuf
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